Linux virtual desktops have proved to be ideal for developers, high-graphics users, and others. For example, if organizations need to onboard third-party programmers and grant them secure remote access into development environments from any device to develop powerful Android apps, a Linux virtual desktop is the best choice.

As a leading DaaS and VDI provider, Citrix provides the capabilities you need to deploy virtual apps and desktops to a modern workforce. IT admins can manage both Windows and Linux apps and desktops using a single console to reduce complexity and increase the ROI of your infrastructure investment.

We continue to improve on our Linux virtual desktops so organizations can get the most from their environments. In this blog post, we’ll take a closer look at the new features in the 2206 Linux VDA release that aid with deploying and managing Linux virtual desktop environments and make it easier to provide a great HDX experience to workers.

SOCKS5 and Transparent Proxy Mode for Rendezvous V2 Protocol

Citrix DaaS has made it easier than ever to onboard Linux virtual desktops into your environments. Citrix DaaS supports hybrid environments with a mixture of public clouds, private clouds, or on-premises datacenters.

Previously, Cloud Connectors needed to be deployed in your resource locations to proxy HDX traffic. With the Rendezvous protocol, admins can enable the HDX session to go directly from the VDA to the Gateway service without going through the Cloud Connector first. With the latest Rendezvous V2 protocol, under non-domain-joined (NDJ) deployment, you can completely remove the Cloud Connector.

Recently, Citrix added the support of SOCKS5 and transparent proxy mode to the Rendezvous V2 protocol, which means you can choose all HTTP proxy, SOCKS5 proxy, transparent proxy, or non-proxy deployment modes now.

Integrate Your Non-Domain-Joined Linux Environment with Azure AD

When onboarding your environment through Citrix DaaS, you need to consider the VDA and user authentication method. Typically, Active Directory integration is leveraged for authentication. Citrix Linux VDA supports various AD integration packages, such as Winbind, SSSD, Centrify, PBIS, and Quest.

However, as a Linux admin, you might not want to involve AD in a Linux environment. Citrix provides a non-domain-joined VDA solution to remove the AD dependency. By default, it also provides Citrix Workspace app users seamless SSO experiences by creating a local mapping user in the VDA for logging in to the virtual desktop.

Our recent blog post about the Azure AD domain-joined solution showcases that the new capability and how it facilitates specific use cases such as temporary workforce, project-based contractors or vendors, M&A, and disaster recovery (DR). Until now, the AAD domain join was only available for Windows. With Citrix’s latest 2206 Current Release, we allow you to integrate the user authentication workflow with AAD based on a non-domain joined Linux VDA hosted in Azure.

After the end user passes the workspace authentication with AAD credentials, the Linux VDA will talk with AAD to get a login code for the user. By scanning the QR code and providing the login code, the user will be authenticated with the same Azure AD credential, then he/she will get the in-session AAD SSO experience when they access certain apps from the Linux virtual desktop. (Please note, with a different setting, Linux VDA also can provide a username/password login box for AAD user authentication)

Here’s an example of the login pop-up a user will receive to log in.

For more information, see our documentation on authentication with Azure Active Directory.

Enhance Your Shared Linux Roaming Profile Experience

Today, admins can leverage the Network File System to roam the Linux User Profile (basically the $Home directory) across different hosts. The Network File System is also suitable for separating the user data storage from the boot disk. Check out this Citrix support article for more details on implementation. In some cases, if the NFS share fails or is unavailable, it might create a bad experience for end users. Starting with the Linux VDA 2204, you can specify a temporary home directory for cases where the mount point on the Linux VDA fails. With a temporary home directory specified, a prompt shows during a session logon when the mount point fails. User data is then stored under the temporary home directory. Please refer to our log on with a temp home directory documentation for more details.

Customize Your Desired Desktop Environment and Enjoy a High-Resolution Monitor

There are multiple desktop environments in the Linux world, and different users may have preferred desktop environments. The Linux VDA now allows admins to customize desktop environments for different VDAs, and we now support Gnome Classic as a new desktop environment.

In some scenarios, a user may need a high-resolution physical screen, but previously, the Linux VDA only supported a default virtual session DPI(96). This resulted in less-than-ideal user experiences, including a small font size on the physical screen. Starting with Linux VDA 2206, the VDA provides an automatic DPI-scaling feature. With this feature, when the end user enables DPI matching on the Citrix Workspace app, the DPI value in the HDX session automatically changes to match the DPI setting on the client side. That means an original scaling from the VDA side, rather than scaling by OS or Citrix Workspace app. Please refer to our automatic DPI scaling documentation for more details.

Enjoy GPU Acceleration Experience for Virtual Desktops and Remote PC

Citrix has supported the HDX 3D Pro technology for many years with NVIDIA Grid cards running in a vGPU or GPU pass-through mode in a virtualized environment. Citrix continues to verify the NVIDIA GPU drivers and hardware. By consuming NVIDIA vGPU drivers, the HDX 3D Pro feature is widely available for NVIDIA GPU models on multiple hypervisor platforms and cloud platforms. As detailed in our H3D system requirement documentation, you need to consider the combination of hypervisor/cloud platform, supported Linux distributions by both Citrix and NVIDIA, and the GPU model and driver.

As covered in this graphics configuration and fine-tuning documentation, there are multiple relevant configurations and policies that admins can deploy. For example, they can specify to use video codec for compression, use it when preferred, use it for entire screen, or use it for actively changing regions.

The considerations are different when there is or isn’t a GPU in place. For example, with a GPU, most customers want to enjoy the hardware encoding capability, but the solution previously sent the entire screen for hardware video encoding. Compared to selective H.264 encoding, working to encode the entire screen may take up more bandwidth and lead to blurry sub-sampled text for still image and text region. When video encoding is preferred for only actively changing regions, the Linux VDA previously just supported selective H.264 software encoding, which meant a high CPU occupation.

Starting with version 2204, the Linux VDA supports selective use of the H.264 hardware codec for actively changing regions. Now you get the a balance between graphics quality, bandwidth, and CPU occupation. Only the actively changing regions are sent to the GPU for encoding to save bandwidth and CPU occupation, and the static image or text area will be processed separately, without wasting bandwidth and creating blurry text issues. You just need to stay at the “Use when preferred” configuration, the graphic module will intelligently choose the best approach for lower bandwidth consumption and better-quality video content combined with lossless text or high-quality imagery.

In addition to the NVIDIA vGPU H3D pro, Citrix also supports non-Grid GPU mode. For example, when you want to access a remote PC that has a GPU card, non-grid GPU mode will be very useful. The CR 2206 release enhanced the non-Grid GPU scenario by removing these issues

  • The monitor of the remote PC cannot be blacked out. Showing session content can pose a security risk.
  • Monitors can display artifacts when multiple monitors are used to access Remote PC Access sessions.

Learn More

We have rolled out some major new features in Linux VDA 2206 that can improve both the admin and user experiences. We encourage you to start testing the new capabilities in your environments! If you aren’t currently leveraging Linux within your environment, request a demo today. For more information on Linux VDA 2206, check out our product documentation.